dantec’s Blog

Although the discussion in class offered the opinion that emotion or feeling can give way to logic and reasoning, Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” seems to contradict this outlook.  When the woman says “I don’t feel any way,” the girl said. “I just know things.” she separates feeling and knowing into two different categories.  The fact that she conveys their lack of relation suggests that the two are indeed separate, and one could even cloud the other.

Emotions are known to give rise to partialities and biased opinions based on how one feels.  If one were two make a decision while angry, the outcome would most likely not be what was desired.  The same could be said for a decision made while in love, these feelings seem to inhibit your ability to think logically.  Emotions are like alcohol, a temporary intoxicant that lowers your inhibitions and clouds your judgement.  However, being able to feel is one of the largest parts of what makes us human. So at the end of the story when the woman states  “I feel fine,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with me. I feel fine.”, she is just asserting her humanity.

In the story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” we are given a shocking look into the disturbing mentality of common 19th century domestic housewife.  The narrator is a woman who’s overbearing husbands controlling nature causes her to regress into a state of childlike ignorance, and ultimately results in her retreat into her own imagination.  In the end, we find her crawling around her husbands sprawled out body, which ironically represents both a victory and a defeat. It is a victory in the sense that her husband has fainted so he is no longer able to cause her any grief, and in her mind she has achieved her objective of tearing down the wallpaper.  However, at the same time she has completed her regression into nothing more than a child that is crawling around the room, skipping over her husband’s unconscious body.

Success in Circuit lies- The term “circuit” conjures up the image of a circle, as if these lies are being told continuously and a web is being woven out of them.  When Dickinson talks of success within these circuit lies, I think she is referring to how easily it is to accept these lies.

Too bright for our infirm Delight- Dickinson describes our delight as weak, which is why it comes as no surprise that these circuit lies are too bright for us.

The Truth’s superb surprise- Here, she offers us a complete contrast to the previously mentioned lies.  Now we have been exposed to the truth and it is surprising

As Lightning to the Children eased- Dickinson compares the truth to lightning in the minds of children.  It is frightening, foreign, and yet it is a startling wake-up call

With explanation kind- here the harsh nature of the truth is smoothed over by a kind explanation.

The Truth must dazzle gradually- The truth needs to be taken in stride, it is too much to handle all at once.  Dickinson is commenting on mankind’s inability to handle the truth.

Or every man be blind – If you do try to take in all the truth at once, then it will overload our truth taking abilities, and eventually we will not even want to know the truth out of fear.

Whitman’s main problem that he faces in this poem is his inability to connect to nature (I vs. the tide) and the people around him (I vs. the crowd).  At first he seems to feel separated from everything, as if he is his own entity.  However, as the poem progresses, Whitman slowly starts to associate himself with the rest of the world.  He begins to realize that he too has seen all that we have seen and felt as we have felt, and ultimately finds his relation to all that surrounds him.

I thought this assignment was really interactive, fun, and gave us all a chance to express our creativity.  Not only did the pictures allow me to associate the poem with vivid images, but I also learned a lot of different perspectives that others had on the poem.  By participating in the assignment, I was able to pick bits and pieces out of the poem and understand them better.  For example, the stanza about the child who brings Whitman the blades of grass was clarafied and I now understand that he was trying to say that the grass is nothing more than a reflection of his character in the form of green woven blades.

In this section of the poem, Whitman describes the attainment of knowledge that was originally beyond our grasp; that of all poetry, of all persepectives on earth.  Sentences such as, “You shall possess the good of the earth and the sun…” suggest that the attainment of this higher knowledge is almost superhuman, as if you now know everything there is to know on this planet.  Therefore, you become something more, something that can’t manifest itself physically, you have just experienced massive spiritual growth and you are now bigger than the earth itself. This is why I chose this picture.  The holding of the sun conjures up the idea that you control the universe.  The sun is the force that drives all life on this planet, so in a way you now hold life itself.

In Emerson’s essay “The American Scholar,” he seeks to prove the difference between higher knowledge and being book smart.  Throughout the essay he says that creativity is what ultimately results in the creation of ideas and knowledge that were unknown to the world at the time.  However, by reading books and studying past works of acclaimed authors and intellectuals, people are only re-learning what has already been discovered by humanity.  He also states that people have a tendency to glorify these authors as being highly intellectual, and through their learning of the material they themselves attain an intellectual label.

Now, when Emerson says “Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made,” he is referring to the fact that the books are only a record of the actual discovery made.  The findings that were placed into the book should receive credit, not the books themselves.

In the story “The Man of the Crowd,” by Edgar Allen Poe, the narrator describes the scene of the local coffee shop that he is sitting in.  In his description of the setting, he seems to lump all the characters he describes into categories such as businessmen, pick pockets, drunks, and gamblers, which suggests that there really isn’t much diversity between the people that spend their time at the coffee shop.  The similar nature of all the people at the shop musters up a feeling of boredom and repetitiveness, which is why the narrator is so intrigued when his eyes fall upon a decrepit old man with a very idiosyncratic expression on his face.  The peculiar expression and demeanor of the man, in comparison to the rest of the company at the coffee shop, captures the narrator’s interest and ultimately leads to his pursuit of the old man.

The narrator seems to be a strange character himself.  Not many people in their right mind would pursue an old man for hours on end just because he has an intriguing and peculiar demeanor.  Then again, the narrator mentions that he is currently recovering from an illness, and perhaps he is not exactly well in the head.  This could be another reason for his absurd pursuit of the old frail character.

Pollution, when defined as a mixing of things that should be kept separate, is not all too prevalent in my world.  When I look at the definition of pollution here, whether or not it exists seems to become a matter of opinion.  Some combinations that many feel are perfectly acceptable, might not be right for others.  For example, America is well know for it’s racial diversity, and I am all for racial integration and see it as a perfectly natural and acceptable way to live.  However, many other people fear racial integration and think it unnatural and unacceptable, and therefore may deem it as social pollution.

On the other hand, I feel that our instituition of government is polluted by religion.  This country was founded upon many great principles, one of which was the separation of church and state.  However, we see the infiltration of our government by religious beliefs on a daily basis.  How many times have you heard the statement “But the Bible says…” in an argument about same sex marriage or civil rights?  The instituition of marriage as we know it today has been molded into one that consists of conventional Catholic convictions.  But I digress, pollution is but a matter of opinion, the trick lies in preventing contaminated opinions, those which may ultimately lead to the destruction or regression of the human race, from infecting your mind.